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Zmeselo
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Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

The U.S. Stole Billions From Haiti. It’s Time to Give It Back.

Post by Zmeselo » 22 Sep 2021, 03:11



The U.S. Stole Billions From Haiti. It’s Time to Give It Back.

BY JOSEPH BLOCHER AND MITU GULATI

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... tions.html

SEPT 14, 2021


International aid is once again pouring into Haiti after a devastating earthquake. Richard Pierrin /AFP via Getty Images

Haiti is in desperate need after a devastating earthquake, a hurricane, a presidential assassination, and not enough vaccines to stop the delta variant. International aid is pouring in, which is all good, but not good enough.

It is time to ask about what Haiti is owed—not in terms of international benevolence or moral duty, but as a matter of basic legal rights and principles. Many think of Haiti as a debtor nation, but the fact is that former colonial powers might be the ones legally in debt to Haiti. And the basis for that debt is not just a generalized grievance about colonial domination, but something much more tangible: Haiti once had something of great value, and the United States took it. That something is a small, uninhabited, rocky island covered in a million tons of sun-baked bird [deleted].

The island of Navassa is about 30 miles off the coast of Haiti and is covered in centuries’ worth of accumulated bird droppings—guano. Sometimes referred to as “white gold,https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... nt-history guano is a potent fertilizer that in the mid-1800s was a scarce resource for which American farmers were desperate. Peru had large amounts of the stuff, but its near monopoly position and special deal with Britain https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/w ... n-on-guano meant that American farmers were priced out. In 1850, guano was $76 a pound—a quarter of the price of gold at the time. The situation was so dire that President Millard Fillmore devoted portions of his 1850 State of the Union address to the subject.

To solve the problem, the U.S. resorted to a kind of privatized colonialism. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 (which, incredibly, is still on the books) authorized American entrepreneurs to search the world and seize unclaimed islands anywhere that guano could be mined. The key implication was that the might of the U.S. Navy would back up Americans’ claims.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, administration of the act was—pardon—a shìt show. A State Department analysis in the 1930s concluded that many of the islands seized under the act actually already belonged to other nations, and the U.S. has quietly returned many of them over the years.

Not so with Navassa. In 1857, Haiti was not yet mining the guano on the island in its backyard, but when American entrepreneurs claimed the island, Haitians protested. The U.S. responded by sending its navy to Port-au-Prince to tell the Haitians to stay away from Navassa.

Such behavior is not surprising. In 1857, the U.S. did not even recognize Haiti as a nation, even though it had become independent a half-century earlier (having been forced to literally purchase its freedom from France). The fact that Haiti emerged from a slave revolution was offensive and scary to many American politicians, who feared that recognizing Haiti would encourage enslaved people in the U.S. to think of their own revolution.

Haiti, for its part, has continued to quietly maintain its claim to Navassa—the constitution of Haiti even says so. But Haiti’s near-vassal state relationship with the U.S. over the past century-and-a-half has meant that no Haitian government has been willing to bring formal claims for the unlawful taking of its property.

In ordinary life, if someone takes your property and keeps it by threat of force, the law is supposed to provide a remedy—generally the return of the asset and monetary compensation for the opportunity costs of having not had use of the asset. Even if the government takes part of your land for public use, you’re constitutionally entitled to just compensation. So why not Haiti? Some might object that historical injustices at a certain point become too attenuated or complex to remedy with money—that is a common argument against reparations for slavery, or the illegitimate conquest of inhabited territory, or pillaged art. Haiti has plenty of those larger claims as well. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... f=wvo74VD0

But maybe we can start small, with the taking of that little island covered in bird droppings. Navassa is a tangible, transferable piece of real property that was taken from Haiti at a time when it was covered in one of the world’s most valuable assets. Whether we call it a debt, damages, reparations, or an offer to settle a disputed claim, it is long past time for the U.S. to pay up.

And how much is the bill? Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that it’s pretty substantial. In 1857, it was estimated that there were a million tons of guano on Navassa, piled between one and six feet deep. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/137/202 Using conservative estimates (and assuming no further deposits by seabirds), the million tons would have been worth about $2 billion in today’s dollars. And if that money earned a return rate of between 1 and 3 percent per year for 170 years, we’d be looking at between $10 billion and $260 billion. That wouldn’t solve all of Haiti’s problems. But it would be a step toward remedying what we’ve taken.

Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati are faculty in the law departments of Duke and U. Virginia respectively. Their article, “La Navassa: Property, Sovereignty and the Law of the Territories” is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.

Zmeselo
Senior Member+
Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

Re: The U.S. Stole Billions From Haiti. It’s Time to Give It Back.

Post by Zmeselo » 22 Sep 2021, 07:29



No rest for the wicked? Anti-war activists continue to heckle liberal media darling George W. Bush during public appearances

https://www.rt.com/usa/535442-bush-heck ... rotesters/

21 Sep, 2021


FILE PHOTO. ©Alyssa Pointer / Pool via REUTERS.

The 43rd president of the US may now be beloved by the mainstream left, but some anti-war activists, who want to hold him accountable for the invasion of Iraq, continue to target his public appearances.

The latest disruption happened when George W. Bush was delivering a speech in Long Beach, California on Monday evening. A small protest by about 30 members of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition met him at the location, demanding his arrest for war crimes. The group followed Bush from Beverly Hills, where they picketed his speech on Sunday.



Activist Jeb Sprague said he was briefly detained after disrupting Bush's Monday talk at Terrace Theater with his message and kicked out of the venue. He said he failed to livestream his protest as he intended due to a technical malfunction.

Fellow activist Mike Prysner was more https://www.answercoalition.org/iraq_wa ... ing_speech successful on the previous night, when he interrupted Bush's speech at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills with accusations of lying the nation into the Iraq War.



Bush used to be a bogeyman for the US left, loathed for the destructive hawkish policies of his administration. The 2003 invasion followed a relentless PR campaign to rally public support for the planned war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, based largely on claims that later proved to be false. Those included accusations that Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda or was prepared to strike Europe with weapons of mass destruction. The war claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, became a drain for US resources and sent shockwaves of instability and extremism throughout the Middle East.

Dubya managed to reinvent himself in the eyes of many former critics after Donald Trump emerged as a more convenient target for their hatred. He is now perceived by many as the face of the good old decorous pre-Trump GOP, an opposite number to Joe Biden in a drive for bipartisanship. The liberal media has been reliably gushing about his painting hobby, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, being buddies with the Obama family and many other episodes in the past few years.

People who preserved their attitude to the former president find this appalling, disturbing and dangerous for the future of the country.


________________



‘They crave his War on Terror’: Glenn Greenwald tears into liberals for praising George W. Bush's 9/11 speech on threat ‘at home’

https://www.rt.com/usa/534649-greenwald ... rror-bush/

12 Sep, 2021


© REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Journalist Glenn Greenwald tore into several prominent Democrats after they praised ex-President George W. Bush’s speech about the
dangers to our country
rising
at home
– 20 years after the beginning of his ‘War on Terror’.

In his speech on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks – which sparked Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan, war crimes, and the rise of a surveillance state against American citizens – the former president warned that there was
growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.
There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,
he continued.
But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.
Bush appeared to be referring to the January 6 storming of the US Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump in protest of President Joe Biden’s election victory, which they alleged to be fraudulent.

Since the storming took place in January, many prominent Democrats have attempted to compare the incident to 9/11, with President Biden even referring to the riot as
the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
Bush’s speech this week, and in particular its warning of a new domestic terrorism threat, was praised and shared by many liberals, including former President Bill Clinton, commentator Keith Olbermann, Daily Beast editor-at-large Molly Jong-Fast, legal scholar Lawrence Tribe, and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin – a fact that independent journalist Glenn Greenwald was happy to point out on Sunday.
Liberals swooned emotionally all day yesterday for George W. Bush because they crave his War on Terror, but just want it unleashed domestically at their political opponents,
Greenwald declared.
Hearing Bush link 9/11 with 1/6, and compare his War on Terror with their new one, was ecstasy for them,
he argued, calling comparisons between conservatives and
alleged ‘Muslim extremists’
one of the
top political priorities of US liberalism, whose authoritarianism cannot be overstated.




Six hundred and thirty-nine Americans have been charged for taking part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, with several complaining about the human rights violations they have allegedly experienced in jail since.

One protester, Ashley Babbitt, was killed during the storming by Capitol Police Officer Lt. Michael Byrd. Three others died from natural causes either during or after the incident, and one more person involved died from a drug overdose.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killed 2,997 people.

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